Couple viciously stabbed in home

Instead, her mother told her to call her immediately when she went into labor and Currie would jump on a plane to be there when she delivered.

But on the day Walker gave birth, the baby came too fast to call her mother. Doctors gave her heavy sedation after she delivered

Janice Marie Currie

a daughter; it was hours before she learned her mother was dead. The medications, mixed with horror and happiness, left an indelible mark in her memory.

“It was like stepping outside my body,” she said.

Authorities believed that her mother and her common-law husband, Marshall, were killed by someone they knew because there were no signs of forced entry.

But family members aren’t so sure.

Currie had been telling her mother, Sarann Knight Preddy, 88, that she was concerned someone would sneak into their home to rob and kill them because her retired husband was a wealthy real estate owner who routinely failed to lock the back door to their home, Preddy said.

Too many people knew that the prominent citizen kept a large safe in the closet of his bedroom.

In the months before her death, Currie also said Marshall’s ex-girlfriend was stalking her, Walker said. Currie, who sold scarves in a Denver department store, caught her peeking at her from behind a clothes rack.

“She was frightened of this woman,” Preddy said.

When police entered the fire-damaged house, they found that Marshall’s safe had been pulled out of the closet and emptied of cash and a seven-karat diamond ring Marshall kept inside, Preddy said.

The safe seemed too heavy for one person to move out of the closet, she said.

There were also reasons to believe the murders were motivated by someone with deep personal hatred for the two.
Currie was stabbed 14 times, her daughter said.
“That was personal. That’s more than you need to kill a woman who is 5-feet-3 and weighs 130 pounds,” Walker said.

Marshall had lived in the home for six years and his wife moved in four years later.

At the time of the murders, Currie was trying to overcome a cocaine addiction, Walker said.

Currie had been a professional card dealer at her mother’s nightclub and casino, the Moulin Rouge in Las Vegas. Her mother was the first black woman in Las Vegas to get a gambling license. Currie met Marshall in California and moved to Denver in 1984.

Kirk Mitchell is a general assignment reporter at The Denver Post who focuses on criminal justice stories. He began working at the newspaper in 1998, after writing for newspapers in Mesa, Ariz., and Twin Falls, Idaho, and The Associated Press in Salt Lake City. Mitchell first started writing the Cold Case blog in Fall 2007, in part because Colorado has more than 1,400 unsolved homicides.